Trading-Mentality

I've been having several parallel trains of thought recently. After I go through a trading recap of August and September, I'll touch on the Best Loser Wins book again and how it ties into a fairly recent Chat With Traders interview.

I recently finished this book on Audible and it's been giving me mixed thoughts, even as I'm writing this post. The full title of this book is "Best Loser Wins: Why Normal Thinking Never Wins the Trading Game – written by a high-stake day trader."

A big change in my trading consists of using the average true range (ATR) to set take profit targets. This is based on the assumption that ATR, a measure of volatility, will show the likely movement potential. In other words, a take profit of 1,000 pips will unlikely be hit in the near future if the 10-day ATR is only 30 pips.

Since my last $50K Combine attempt, I haven't thought much of Topstep nor have I made additional posts on them. More recently, I decided to take another shot at trading futures with them, especially since both ES and NQ are in pullbacks.

March was a brutal month, P&L wise. This was primarily due to mixed sentiment around interest rate cuts in the sense that the overall market was having trouble taking a directional bias. This trickled down to the signals that I look for, which resulted in a lot of false breakouts.

Although the month of February isn't over just yet, I do have a few topics in mind to put down. Plus, I doubt I'll be making a lot of trades for the rest of this month. This will be covered in the second half of my post.

I saw an interesting comparison between Gemini Ultra, Claude 2.1 (no idea what this is), and ChatGPT 4 on Reddit recently. It pointed out the fact that Gemini has a tendency to be confidently wrong, and I decided to test this out for myself.

Over the past few months, my trading strategy has changed 180 - I went from taking a contrarian approach to trend-following. This has to do with the podcast episode I listened to in this post . It's simply the fact that trend-following is really the only way to size up bigger positions.